The largest Maritime Disaster in History
Next to the History and Art Museum in Kaliningrad is a statue of Alexander Marinesko, the Soviet submarine commander who sank the liner MV Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea with perhaps as many 10,000 refugees, most of them civilians, in January of 1945. It was the worst maritime disaster in history.
On January 12th, the Soviet army had broken through on three fronts, and by the 26th they reached the eastern shore of the Gulf of Danzig. This effectively cut Prussia off from the rest of Germany, and from that moment the only escape could be by sea.
At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner Wilhelm Gustloff, as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler’s address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren’t listening to the Führer now.
They wanted one thing – to be rescued. Of the estimated more than 10,000 mostly women and children, elderly men and including about 1,200 navy sailors, only very few – 1,252, to be precise – made it off the steamer alive. Three Soviet torpedoes had hit the ship within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.
The solace offered by the Wilhelm Gustloff was enormous for the passengers who boarded the ship at Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had wanted to embark on ship in the port near Gdansk, in what is today Poland. The Red Army was on their heels and their thoughts were of Nemmersdorf. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and rumours were circulating of the draconian revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.
At 208 meters (680 feet), the Gustloff wasn’t the largest ship used to transport wounded soldiers and civilians. But it was by far the most well known. It was the Nazis’ luxury liner, christened by none other than Hitler in 1937. Its name came from a killed Nazi officer, and it was initially reserved for high-ranking National Socialists to take vacations in the Mediterranean or along the western Norwegian coastline. By the end of the war, however, the ship had taken on an entirely different role – for its last journey.
The Grossadmiral Dönitz sea bridge
The civilian escape via the Baltic Sea belongs to one the most impressive chapters in German WWII military history. Historians have estimated that around 2.5 million people were rescued by ship out of the German eastern zones. A comprehensive study has been published about the operation titled “Rescue Mission Baltic Sea 1944/1945: One of Humanity’s Great Deeds.” One of the main German officers credited with the success of the operation is Admiral Karl Dönitz, who would succeed Hitler as chancellor following the Führer’s suicide in a Berlin bunker at the close of the war.
The tragic end of the Gustloff, just one of dozens of ships used in the Baltic rescue operation, wasn’t inevitable, experts have contended, singling out three fatal decisions as responsible for the disaster. Firstly, there was no convoy to offer protection, and since the ship carrying some 1,000 soldiers was intended to reach Kiel as quickly as possible, there was also no flank protection.
A small torpedo boat was all the protection the ship was given. Sea mines were feared along the Baltic coast, so the planned route was to traverse the open sea. Finally, since the Gustloff hadn’t been used in over four years, Captain Wilhelm Peterson only dared a speed of 12 knots, instead of the possible 15.
These three factors contributed to what would become a death sentence for most of the ship’s passengers. If the ship were escorted by a convoy, been provided flank protection, and traveled at a faster speed, experts have said the Soviet submarine S-13 would never have been able to hit the Wilhelm Gustloff with its torpedoes.
Seven decades on, some details of the disaster still remain a mystery, however. Was sabotage to blame when a suspicious radio message warning of sea mines reached the command bridge, just before the first torpedo hit? In order to avoid a collision amid heavy snowfall, Captain Peterson had turned on the ship’s position lights: 90 minutes with bright lighting, but no minesweepers. The Gustloff was a sitting duck.
There is much to support the theory that German POWs – “turned by the Soviets” and positioned behind enemy lines via parachutes – were behind the false reports. For Heinz Schön, that is a horrible thought. He was 18 years old at the time, onboard the Gustloff as an aspiring naval pay clerk. Although he was one of the very few survivors, he is reticent to call the sinking of the Gustloff a war crime. It was ultimately carrying soldiers, sailing under enemy colors and armed. The firing of the torpedoes in no way contravened martial law.
(*) The above is largely based on a Deutsche Welle (DW) article of Jan 30, 2015)
Alexander Marinesko
Submarine commander Alexander Marinesko left the Hangö harbour at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland on the morning of 11 January 1945 on the 780-ton Soviet sub S-13 to take position near Kolberg on January 13.
For most of the war, the Nazis had kept the Soviet fleet bottled up in the Russian port city of Kronshtadt located on Kotlin Island, 30 kilometres west of Saint Petersburg, by a blockade and by mining the Gulf of Finland. But after the Russo-Finnish armistice on September 19, 1944 the agreement awarded the Russians important military bases on Finnish territory, including the strategic Hangö peninsula.
While in the first few days his submarine was attacked several times by German torpedo boats, during nineteen days at sea he encountered only civilian small craft in the frigid waters off Lithuania.
He received radio dispatches from his home port describing the fall of Memel (present-day Klaipeda, Lithuania) and Königsberg so he reasoned that naval transports might be evacuating troops to the west. Hugging the coastline, he saw no activity where he expected it most, but on 30 January 1945 Sub-13 attacked and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia, and in so doing caused the largest shipwreck in recorded history.
Days later, on 10 February, Marinesko sank a second German ship with two torpedoes, the Steuben, carrying mostly military personnel, with an estimated total number of 4,267 casualties. Marinesko thus became the most successful Soviet submarine commander in terms of gross register tonnage (GRT) sunk, with 42,000 GRT to his name.
Before sinking the Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and was thus deemed “not suitable to be a hero”. He was instead awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Although widely recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonourably discharged from the navy in October 1945.
In 1960 he was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension. In 1963 Marinesko was given the traditional ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later on 25 November 1963 from cancer, and was buried at the Bogoslovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg. Marinesko was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 after rehabilitation by newspaper Izvestia.